Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.

It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.

[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...

This continues to be an absolute no-go for competitive real-time games due to input latency. I honestly think there's a chance that game clients might go the way of the recording industry, and they just might not be worth that much.

As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud streaming, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.

Microsoft just cut their cloud gaming offering significantly (https://kotaku.com/xbox-cloud-gaming-controller-microsoft-as... and https://kotaku.com/game-pass-will-start-capping-the-number-o...) so that's not happening any time soon.

Maybe they'll go streaming-only, but I'd at least wait until the Switch 2 is hacked before making that prediction.

Feel like eventually ai will get so good people will just autogenerate games just for themselves. Same for movies/shows/etc.

It'll happen regardless, as of now the public internet infrastructure still isn't fast enough to be comparable to local rendering, cloud gaming needs to deliver >50mbps bandwidth at sub 16ms latency.

Unfortunately, I don't know if you've tried cloud gaming. It's just not very good now. Also to force people to use it given the current cost climate for components, it would be extremely expensive.

It's already happening, every effort into preservation of what already exists is important

It's already over. At the very least this will push for more internet connectivity and be good for PC gaming.

Sony's greed has been incredible, let's just accelerate tbh

Have you even tried "cloud gaming"? It’s useless for any game that is latency sensitive (fps, moba, …).

I have only had success with single player games.

I honestly welcome cloud gaming. Action RPGs might be dead in the water, But there were many games suffering from data mining, and having their secrets revealed day 1. Bringing games to cloud gaming could restore the mystery in games